Sramana Mitra: What year did you get that customer? Aki Eldar: 2010. Sramana Mitra: The financial crisis has settled a little bit. I was raising my eyebrows that you got a financial institution. A little bit of time had passed from the calamity. Aki Eldar: They had a huge problem. We were the only one
If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page. Fred has bootstrapped two companies with huge amounts of revenue. The first, he sold to a private equity firm. The second, he is still running. Amazing story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s get started at the beginning of your personal story. Where
Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning a little bit to the story of your entrepreneurial story. Let’s go back to eight years ago when you and your brother left your respective jobs to start this company. You both had deep experience in the security domain. You went and talked to Shlomo
Sramana Mitra: Very good. It’s wonderful to see that you pulled a hardcore technology product company out of India. Varun Singh: You asked me earlier where the engineers were from. They’re from Veritas and IBM. Sramana Mitra: It’s a good place to hire from. That’s a good thing about India right now. There are actually
Sramana Mitra: What are the types of data and the sources of data that you’re securing? You talked about email earlier. Aki Eldar: We’re talking about any unstructured data. Unstructured data could be emails, files, or documents. Regarding your question about the source, it could be any source. It could be any application. It could be
Sramana Mitra: If you’re doing pure product, the customer is supposed to run the product and build an organization around the product. In this case, you are building that organization and you’re doing the business process on behalf of the customer. Anil Kaul: That is correct. The only thing I would add to that is
Sramana Mitra: You have good defensible IP. Varun Singh: Very good defensible IP. That started a few conversation with other VCs. I started a conversation with BV Jagdish from NetScaler. I was one of BV’s largest customers in India. I knew him through Net Magic because he was on the Board. He introduced me to Justin
Sramana Mitra: You had that experience as well. Both of you were security industry insiders and had lots of insight into what’s happening. The reason why I’m asking for this background is that security is probably the segment of the startup industry that has the maximum entrepreneurial activity. It’s crowded. There’s constant startup activity going on.